Director, Pacific Neuropsychiatric Institute, Seattle, WA

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses two aspects: The theoretical concepts and the empirical research pertaining to child prodigies and its links with genius. The research uses a historical IQ method, the SCHIQ and pioneered the quantitation of very high intelligence in that subgroup of child prodigies who had both performed very well in all areas of intellectual endeavor as children and who also had demonstrable achievements as adults. 7 prodigies born in 7 different countries were carefully evaluated based on several case vignettes each pertaining to their child and adult performance. Three raters experienced in high IQ evaluations were used, and their overall deviation of mean IQ assessments for the 28 items was <1.0 per item. However, there was greater variance in subjects with less vignette items, profound intelligence (guesstimated >4.6 d) and in the vignettes reflecting the very young. These items were taken into account to prepare a Standardized Corrected Historical IQ (SCHIQ) score, In the 2 subjects with most vignettes, there were strong correlations with established factors for correlating very high IQ. Secondly, there was early empirical justifications of concepts such as Advanced Prodigy (all 7) and Creative Advanced Prodigy (only 1) in this sample, and the data also supported the idea of necessary new hypothesized factors, namely c factor = Creativity factor; z factor = zeal factor with motivation to completion, e factor (ego-strength), i factor (intuition), n factor (nervous system integration) and a factor (achievement, demonstrable skills) in addition to the known g and

s factors. These were incorporated into a model of Genius spelling out the mnemonic GENIUSES.